The Communist Left in Russia 1918-1930 Part 2

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The
communist left and the counter-revolution, 1921-30

After
1921 the Bolshevik Party found itself in a nightmarish situation.
Following the defeat of workers’ uprisings in Hungary, Italy,
Germany and elsewhere between 1918 and 1921, the world revolution
went into a profound reflux from which it was never to recover,
despite sending out after-shocks like Germany and Bulgaria in 1923
and China in 1927. In Russia both the economy and the proletariat
itself had reached a level of near disintegration; the working masses
had withdrawn or been chased from political life. No longer an
instrument in the hands of the proletariat, the Soviet state had
effectively degenerated into a machine for the defence of capitalist
‘order’. Prison­ers of their substitutionist conceptions, the
Bolsheviks still believed that it was possible to administer this
state machine and the capitalist economy while waiting for and even
assisting the resurgence of the world revolution. In reality, the
neces­sities of state power were transforming the Bolsheviks into
overt agents of the counter­revolution, both at home and abroad.
Inside Russia they became the overseers of an increasingly ferocious
exploitation of the working class. Although the NEP brought with it a
certain relaxation in the state’s economic domination, especially
over the peasants, it did not see any let up in the party’s
dictatorship over the proletariat. On the contrary, since the
Bolsheviks still considered that the main danger of the
counter-revolution within Russia came from the peasants, they
concluded that the econo­mic concessions given to the peasants
had to be counter-balanced by a strengthening
of the political
domination
of Russian soci­ety by the Bolshevik Party; and this brought with
it a reinforcement of tendencies towards monolithism in the party
itself. This ‘tightening up’ of control by the party, and within
the party, was seen as the only way of erecting a proletarian dam
against a flood-tide of peasant capitalism.

Internationally,
the requirements of the Russian state were, through the medium of the
dominant Russian party, having a more and more pernicious effect on
the policies of the Communist International: the United Front, the
workers’ government -- reactionary ‘tactics’ such as these were
to a large ex­tent the expression of the need for the Russian
state to find bourgeois allies in the capitalist world.

Although
the Bolshevik Party had not yet definitively abandoned the
proletarian revolution, the whole logic of the situation it was in
more and more pushed the party into a final and complete
identification with the demands of Russian national capital. Lenin’s
last writings show an obsessive concern with the problems of
‘socialist construction’ in backward Russia. The victory of
Stalinism merely made this logic explicit, eliminating the dilemma
between internationalism and Russian state interests by simply
abandoning the former in favour of the latter.

The
events of the last fifty years have shown that a proletarian party
cannot
sur­vive in a period of reflux or defeat in the class struggle.
Thus, the only way that the communist parties could preserve their
physical existence after the failure of the revolutionary wave was to
pass lock, stock and barrel into the camp of the bourgeoisie. In
Russia the tendency towards degeneration was further accelerated by
the fact that the party had fused with the state and thus had to
adapt itself even more quickly to the demands of national capital. In
a per­iod of defeat, the defence of revolutionary positions can
only be carried on by small communist fractions
who
detach themselves from the degenerating party or survive its demise.
This phenomenon took place in Russia, mainly between 1921 and 1924,
with the emergence of small groupings determined to defend communist
positions against the betrayals of the party. As we have seen, the
emergence of oppositional tendencies within the Bolshevik Party was
not new, but the conditions in which these fractions had to operate
after 1921 differed dramatically from those under which their
predecessors had worked.

The
precondition for defending a communist perspective against the
advancing counter­revolution was, especially in Russia, the
ability to place loyalty to those perspec­tives above all
sentimental, personal, and political attachments to the original
organ­izations of the class, now that the latter had embarked
upon a path of class betrayal. And, indeed, this was the great
achievement of the Russian left fractions; their defiant commitment
to carry out communist work against
the party and against
the
Soviet state as soon as such work could no longer be carried on
within those institutions.

For
the left, communist positions came first. If the ‘heroes’ of the
revolution no longer defended the communist programme, then those
heroes had to be denounced and left behind. It is not surprising that
the Russian left communists tended to be made up of relatively
obscure individuals, main­ly workers, who had not been part of
the Bolshevik leadership during the heroic years. (Miasnikov even
used to deride the Left Opposition as being nothing but an
“opposition
of celebrities”
who only oppo­sed the Stalinist faction for their bureau­cratic
reasons -- see L’Ouvrier
Communiste,no.
6, January 1930). These revolutionary workers were able to understand
the condi­tions facing the Russian proletariat much more easily
than high-ranking Bolshevik officials who had really lost touch with
the class and were only capable of seeing the problems of the
revolution in terms of state administration. At the same time,
however, the obscure origins of the left fractions’ members were
often a factor of weakness in these groups. Their analyses tended to
be based more on a raw class instinct than on a profound theoretical
formation. Coupled with the historic weak­nesses of the Russian
workers’ movement, which we have already mentioned, and the
isolation of the Russian left from communist fractions outside
Russia, these factors placed serious limits on the theoretical
evolution of left communism in Russia.

Despite
the left’s ability to break from ‘official’ institutions and to
identify with the struggle of the class against them, the immense
retreat of the class in Russia posed the left fractions with a series
of opaque and contradictory problems. Despite its rapid degeneration
after 1921, the Bolshevik Party remained the focus of pro­letarian
life in Russia since the soviets, factory committees and other mass
organs of the class were dead, and the state itself had become an
organ of capital. Because of the apathy and indifference of the
class, political debate and conflict were centred almost exclusively
around the party. It is true that the very indifference and
non-activity of the class made most of the ideo­logical debates
within the party in the twenties sterile from the beginning, but the
fact that the party was a kind of oasis of political thought in a
desert of working class apoliticism could not be ignored by
revolutionaries.

This
situation placed the left fractions in a horrible dilemma. On the one
hand the apathy of the masses, together with the rep­ressive
actions of the state, made it extr­emely difficult to militate
within the pro­letariat ‘in general’. On the other hand, any
work towards the party was severely hampered by the banning of
factions in 1921 and the increasingly stifling atmosphere within the
party; it was almost impossible for any genuinely oppositional group
to do legal work within the party. Even the rel­atively mild
criticisms voiced in 1923 by the Platform
of the Forty-Six (the
founding document of the Left Opposition) contained the complaint
that “free
discussion within the party has in fact disappeared; the party’s
social mind has been choked off”.
For the tendencies to the left of the Left Opposition, the situation
was even worse; and yet all of them continued to combine propaganda
work among the ‘broad masses’ of the factories with secret work
within the local party cells. The Workers’ Group in its 1923
Manifesto
spoke
of the “neces­sity
to constitute the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party
(Bolshevik) on the basis of the programme and statutes of the RCP, in
order to exert a decisive pressure on the leading group of the party
itself.”
The Workers’ Truth group’s 1922 Appeal
expressed
the view that “everywhere in the mills and factories, in the trade
union organizations, the workers’ faculties, the Soviet and party
schools, the Communist Union of Youth, and the party organizations,
propaganda circles must be created in soli­darity with the
Workers’
Truth.”1
Such declarations of intent demonstrate the extreme difficulty facing
these groups in their efforts to find an echo in the Russian
proletariat and the impossibility of their finding clear-cut
organizational solutions in a period of disarray and confusion.

Finally,
we must bear in mind the fact that these groupings were subject to
the most intense persecution and repression at the hands of the
party-state. Precisely because Russia had been the ‘land of the
Soviets’, the country of the proletarian revolution, the
counter-revolution there had to be total, ruthless and implacable,
burying the last traces of everything that had been revolu­tionary.
Even before the victory of the Stalinist faction, the left groupings
had been subject to investigation by the GPU, arrest, imprisonment
and exile. Deprived of funds and equipment, constantly on the run
from the secret police, it was difficult for them to carry out even a
bare minimum of political propaganda. The solidification of the
counter-revolution after 1924 made things even harder. And yet
throughout these dark years of reaction the left commu­nists
continued to fight for the revolution. As late as 1929 the Workers’
Group was pub­lishing an illegal paper in Moscow, The
Workers’ Road to Power.
Even in the Stali­nist labour camps their political voices were
not silenced. A proletarian revolution does not die easily. The
revolutionaries who fought on in such adverse circumstances derived
their courage and their tenacious­ness from the simple fact that
they had been born out of a revolution of the working class. Let us
therefore examine in more detail the principal groupings who kept the
flag of the communist revolution flying in spite of everything that
was piled up against them.

1.
The Workers’ Truth

The
Workers’ Truth group was formed in the autumn of 1921. It appears
to have been composed mainly of intellectuals, and to have grown out
of the ‘Proletkult’ cultural milieu whose main animator was
Bogdanov - a party theorist who had clashed with Lenin over
philosophical problems in the 1900s and who had been prominent in the
‘left’ tendencies in Bolshevism at that time. In its 1922 Appeal,
Workers’ Truth characteri­zed the NEP, “the
rebirth of normal capita­list relations”,
as signifying a profound defeat for the Russian proletariat:

“The
working class of Russia is disorgan­ized; confusion reigns in the
minds of the workers; are they in a country of the ‘dictatorship of
the proletariat’, as the Communist Party untiringly reite­rates
by word of mouth and in the press? Or are they in a country of
arbitrary rule and exploitation, as life tells them at every step.
The working class is leading a miserable existence at a time when the
new bourgeoisie (ie the responsible functionaries, plant directors,
heads of trusts, chairmen of execu­tive committees,
etc)
and the Nepmen live in luxury and recall in our memory the picture of
the life of the bourgeoisie of all times.”

For
the Workers’ Truth the ‘Soviet’ state has become “the
representative of the nation­wide interests of capital ... the
mere dir­ecting apparatus of political administra­tion and
economic regulation by the organizer intelligentsia.”
At the same time the working class had been deprived of its defensive
organs, the unions, and of its class party. In a manifesto issued to
the Twelfth Party Congress of 1923, Workers’ Truth charged the
unions with:

“converting
themselves from organizations to defend the economic interests of the
workers into organizations to defend the interests of production, ie
of state capital first and foremost.”
(Quoted in E.H. Carr, The
Interregnum.)

As
for the party, the Appeal
asserts
that: “The
Russian-Communist
Party has become the party of the organizer intelligent­sia. The
abyss between the Russian
Communist
Party and the working class is getting deeper and deeper
...”

They
therefore declared their intention of working towards the formation
of a real “party
of the Russian proletariat”,
though they admit that their work will be “long
and persistent, and first of all ideologi­cal”.

Although
the relatively modest aims of the Workers’ Truth group appear to
express some understanding of the defeat the class had suffered and
of the consequent limitations on revolutionary activity in such a
period, their whole framework is vitiated by a peculiar ambiguity
about the historic
epoch
and the tasks confronting the class globally. Perhaps basing
themselves on Bogdanov’s idea that until the proletariat has
matured into a capable organizing class, socialist revolution would
be premature, they imply that the revolution in Russia had had the
task of opening up a phase of capitalist
development:

“After
the successful revolution and civil war, broad perspectives opened
be­fore Russia, of rapid transformation into a country of
progressive capitalism. In this lies the undoubted and tremendous
achievement of the revolution in October.”
(Appeal)

This
perspective also led the Workers’ Truth group to advocate a strange
foreign policy for Russia, calling for rapproche­ment with
‘progressive’ capitalism in America and Germany against
‘reactionary’ France. At the same time the group seems to have
had little or no contact with left communist groups outside Russia.

It
was positions such as these which no doubt led the Workers’ Group
of Miasnikov to proclaim that it had “nothing
in common with the so-called ‘Workers’ Truth’ which attempts to
wipe out everything that was communist in the revolution of October
1917 and is, therefore, completely Menshevist”
(Workers’
Dreadnought,
31 May 1924) -- though in its 1923 Manifesto
the
Workers’ Group acknowledges that groups like the Workers’ Truth,
Democratic Centralism and the Workers’ Opposition contain many
honest proletarian elements and calls on them to regroup on the basis
of the Workers’ Group’s Manifesto.

At
the time of the Russian Revolution those who talked about the
‘inevitability’ of a bourgeois evolution for Russia tended to be
identified as Mensheviks. But in the light of subsequent experience,
we prefer to com­pare the positions of the Workers’ Truth group
to the analysis arrived at by the German and Dutch left in the 1930s.
Like the Workers’ Truth, the latter began with some perceptive
insights into the nature of state capitalism, but undermined their
anal­ysis by concluding that the Russian Revolu­tion had from
the beginning been an affair of the intelligentsia carrying out the
organization of state capitalism in a coun­try which had been
unripe for communist revolution. In other words, the analysis put
forward by Workers’ Truth is that of a revolutionary tendency
demoralized and confused by the defeat of the revolution and thus led
to call into question the orig­inal proletarian character of that
revolu­tion. In the absence of a clear and coher­ent
framework in which to analyze the degeneration of the revolution,
such devia­tions are inevitable particularly in the adverse
conditions in which revolutionaries in Russia found themselves after
1921.

But
despite a certain pessimism and intell­ectualism, the Workers’
Truth group did not hesitate to intervene in the wildcat strikes
which swept across Russia in the summer of 1923, attempting to raise
political slogans within the general class movement. This
intervention, however, brought the full force of the GPU down on the
group and its back was broken quite quickly in the repression that
followed.

2.
The Workers’ Group and the Communist Workers’ Party

We
have seen that many of the weaknesses of groups like the Workers’
Opposition and Workers’ Truth can be traced to their lack of an
international perspective. As a coro­llary to this we can say
that the most impor­tant of the left communist fractions in
Russia were precisely those who emphasized the international
nature
of the revolution and the need for revolutionaries of the whole world
to join together. This was the case with the elements in Russia who
corres­ponded most closely to the German KAPD and its fraternal
organizations.

On
3 June and 17 June 1922, the Workers’
Dreadnought published
a statement by a recently formed group calling itself the “Group
of Revolutionary Left Communists (Communist Workers’ Party) of
Russia”.
They announced themselves as a group that had left “the
social democratic Russian Commu­nist Party which has made
business its chief concern”
(WD,
3 June); and although they pledged themselves to “support
all that is left of revolutionary tendencies in the Russian Communist
Party”
and to “welcome
and support all the demands and propositions of the Workers’
Opposition which point in a sound revolutionary direction”,
they insisted that “there
is no possibility of reforming the Russian Communist Party from
within. In any case the Workers’ Opposition is not capable of doing
it.”
(WD,
17 June). The group denounced the efforts of the Bolsheviks and the
Comintern to compromise with capi­tal both in Russia and abroad,
and in parti­cular attacked the Comintern’s United Front policy
as a means for the “reconstruction
of the capitalist world economy”
(WD,
17 June). Since the Bolsheviks and the Comin­tern were taking an
opportunist course which could only lead to their integration into
capitalism, the group affirmed that the time had come to work for a
Communist Workers’ Party of Russia aligned to the KAPD of Germany,
the Dutch KAP, and other parties
of the Communist Workers’ International.2

The
subsequent development of this group is obscure, but it seems to have
been closely bound up with the better known Workers’ Group (also
known as the Communist Workers’ Group) of Miasnikov -- in fact the
Russian ‘CWP’ of 1922 seems to be a precursor of the latter. On 1
December 1923 the Dread­nought
announced
that it had been sent a copy of the Workers’ Group’s Manifesto
by
the CWP, along with a protest by the CWP against the imprisonment in
Russia of Miasnikov, Kuznetzov, and other militants of the Workers’
Group. In 1924 the KAPD published the Manifesto
in
Germany and described the Workers’ Group as the “Russian
section of the IVth International”.
In any case, the defence of left communism as exemplified by the KAPD
was henceforward to be carried on in Russia by the Miasnikov group.

Gabriel
Miasnikov, a worker from the Urals, had leapt to prominence in the
Bolshevik Party in 1921 when, immediately after the crucial Tenth
Congress, he had called for “freedom
of the press from monarchists to anarchists inclusive”
(quoted in Carr, The
Interregnum).
Despite Lenin’s attempts to dissuade him from this agitation, he
refused to climb down and was expelled from the party in early 1922.
In February-March 1923 he joined with other militants to found the
Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), and they
published their Manifesto,
which was distributed at the Twelfth Congress of the RCP. The group
began to do illegal work amongst party and non-party workers, and
seems to have had an important presence in the strike wave of summer
1923, calling for mass demonstrations and trying to politicize an
essentially defensive class movement. Their activities in these
strikes were enough to convince the GPU that they were a real threat;
a wave of arrests of their leading militants dealt a severe blow to
the group. But as we have seen, they carried on their underground
work, if on a reduced scale, until the beginning of the 1930s.3

The
Workers’ Group’s Manifesto
is a consid­erable advance on the Appeal
of
the Workers’ Truth, but it still shows the hesitations and
half-formed ideas of the communist left, especially in Russia, in
that period.

The
Manifesto
contains
the usual denuncia­tions of the dreadful material conditions
being suffered by the Russian workers and of the inequalities that
accompany the NEP, and asks “is
it in reality possible that the Nep (new economic policy) is changing
into the NEP - the New Exploitation of the Prole­tariat?”.
It goes on to attack the suppres­sion of dissent inside and
outside the party, and the danger of the party being transfor­med
into “a
minority, wielding control of power and of the country’s economic
resour­ces, which will end up as a bureaucratic caste”.
It argues that the unions, soviets and factory committees have lost
their func­tion as proletarian organs, so that the class has no
control either of production or the political apparatus of the
regime. And it calls for a regeneration of all these organs, a
radical reform of the Soviet system which will enable the class to
exert its domina­tion over economic and political life.

This
immediately brings us to the major problem which faced the Russian
left in the early twenties. What attitude should they take up to the
Soviet regime? Did the re­gime still have any proletarian
character, or should revolutionaries call for its out and out
destruction? The trouble was that during those years there simply was
neither the experience nor the established criteria for deciding
whether or not the regime had become completely
counter-revolutionary. This dilemma is reflected in the ambiguous
attitude the Workers’ Group took up towards the regime. Thus it
attacks the inequali­ties of the NEP and the danger of its
“bureaucratic
degeneration”
while at the same time asserting that “the
NEP is the direct result of the situation of the prod­uctive
forces of our country. It must be used to consolidate the positions
conquered by the proletariat in October.”4
The Manifesto
thus
puts forward a series of suggestions for ‘improving’ the NEP –
workers’ control, non-dependence on foreign capital etc. Similarly,
while criticizing the degeneration of the party, the Workers’
Group, as we have seen, opted for work among party members and for
putting pressure on the party leadership. And although else­where
the group posed the question whether the proletariat might not be
“compelled
to once again start anew the struggle -- and perhaps a bloody one --
for the overthrow of the oligarchy”
(quoted in Carr, The
interre­gnum),
the main emphasis of the Manifesto
is on the regeneration
of
the Soviet state and its institutions, not on their violent
overthrow. The position of ‘critical sup­port’ is further
underlined by the fact, that, in the face of the war threat posed by
the Curzon Ultimatum of 1923, the members of the Workers’ Group are
reported to have taken an oath to resist “all
attempts to overthrow the Soviet power”
(Carr, Ibid).
Whether or not it was ‘correct’ to defend the Russian regime in
1923 is not really the point. The positions the Workers’ Group took
up then certainly did not make it counter-revolutionary, because the
exper­ience of the class had not yet definitively settled the
Russian question. Its ambigui­ties about the nature of the
Russian regime are above all testimony to the immense dif­ficulties
this question posed to revolution­aries in the confusion and
disarray of those years.

But
the most important aspect of the Workers’ Group was not its
analysis of the Russian regime but it’s intransigently
internationa­list perspective. Significantly, the 1923 Manifesto
begins
with a powerful description of the world crisis of capitalism and
posed the choice facing mankind as a whole: socialism or barbarism.
In attempting to explain the delay in the working class arriving at a
revolutionary consciousness in the face of this crisis, the Manifesto
mounts a marvelous attack on the universally counter-revolutionary
role of Social Democracy:

“The
Socialists of all countries, are at any given moment the only
saviours of the bourgeoisie from the proletarian revolu­tion,
because the working masses are accustomed to be suspicious of
everything which comes from their oppressors, but when the same
things are described as being in its interests and are adorned with
socialist phrases, then the worker who is misled by these phrases
believes the traitors and expends his energies in a hopeless
struggle. The bourgeoisie has, and will have, no better advocate.”

This
understanding allows the Workers’ Group to make a series of bitter
denuncia­tions of the Comintern’s tactics of the United Front
and the Workers’ government as so many ways of tying the
proletariat to its class enemies. Though less aware of the
reactionary role of the unions, the Workers’ Group shared the
KAPD’s perception that in the new epoch of capitalist decay all the
old reformist tactics had to be jettisoned:

“The
time when the working class could improve their material and legal
position by strikes and entrance into Parliament is now irrevocably
past. It must be said openly. The struggle for the most immed­iate
objectives is a struggle for power. We must drive home by our
propaganda that, though we have called for strikes in various cases,
these cannot really improve the workers’ conditions. But you,
workers, have not yet overcome the old reformist illusions and are
carrying on a fight which only exhausts you. We are in solidarity
with you in your strikes, but we always insist that these movements
will not liberate you from slavery, expl­oitation and hopeless
poverty. The only road to victory is the conquest of power by your
own rough hands.”

The
role of the party, then, is to prepare the masses everywhere for
civil war against the bourgeoisie.

The
Workers’ Groups understanding of the new historic epoch appears to
contain all the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the KAPD’s
idea of the “death crisis of capital­ism”. For both, once
capitalism had entered into its final crisis, the conditions for a
proletarian revolution exist at any time: the role of the party is
thus one of detona­ting the class into a revolutionary
explos­ion. Nowhere in the Manifesto
is
there any understanding of the reflux
of
the world revolution that has taken place, requiring a careful
analysis of the new perspectives open to revolutionaries. For the
Workers’ Group in 1923, world revolution was just as much on the
agenda as it had been in 1917. Thus it could share the KAPD’s
illusions in the possibility of building a IVth Interna­tional in
1922, and as late as 1928-31 Miasnikov was still trying to organize a
Communist Workers’ Party for Russia.5
It appears that only the Italian Left was able to develop an
appreciation of the role of the communist fraction
in
a period of reflux, when the party can no longer exist. For the KAPD,
the Workers’
Dreadnought,
Miasnikov and others, the party could exist at any time. The
corollary to this immediatist view was an inexorable tendency towards
political disintegration: even allowing for the effects of
repression, the German left communists, like their Russian and
English sympathizers, found it almost impossible to sustain their
political existence during the period of counter-revolution.

The
concrete proposals advanced by the Wor­kers’ Group concerning
the international regroupment of revolutionaries show a healthy
concern for the maximum possible unity of revolutionary forces, but
they also reflect the same dilemmas about the relationship of the
communist left to the degenerating ‘offical’ communist
institutions which we have noted elsewhere. Thus while fiercely
opposing any United Front with the Social Democrats, the Workers’
Group’s Manifesto
calls for a kind of united front of all genuine revolutionary
elements, among whom it included the parties of the IIIrd
Inter­national as well as the Communist Workers’ Parties. On
another occasion the Workers’ Group is reported to have entered
into neg­otiations with the KPD left around Maslow in an attempt
to draw Maslow into its aborted ‘foreign bureau’. The KAPD in its
comments on the Manifesto
was
extremely critical of what it called the Workers’ Group’s
“illu­sion
that you can revolutionize the Commu­nist International….the
IIIrd Internatio­nal is no longer an instrument of proletarian
class struggle. This is why the Commu­nist Workers’ Parties
have founded the Communist Workers’ International.”
However the Workers’ Group’s dilemma about the nature of the
Russian regime and of the Comin­tern was to be resolved in the
light of practical experience. The victory of Stal­inism in
Russia led it to take a more intran­sigent line against the
bureaucracy and its state, while the rapid decomposition of the
Comintern after 1923 made it inevitable that the future international
‘partners’ of the Workers’ Group would be the genuine left
communists of different countries. It was first and foremost this
‘international connection’ with the survivors of the
rev­olutionary wave which allowed revolutiona­ries like
Miasnikov to attain a relatively high level of clarity in the sea of
confu­sion, demoralization and dupery which had engulfed the
Russian workers’ movement.

3.
The ‘irreconcilables’ of the Left Opposition

We
cannot go into the whole question of the Left Opposition here.
Although their confu­sed defence of party democracy, of the
Chinese Revolution, and of internationalism against the Stalinist
theory of ‘socialism in one country’ demonstrate that the Left
Opposition was a proletarian
current,
in fact the last spark of resistance in the Bolshevik Party and the
Comintern, the inade­quacy
of
their critique of the advancing counter-revolution makes it
impossible to consider the Left Opposition, as a body,
part of the revolutionary tradition of the communist left. On the
international level, their refusal to question the Theses of the
first four Congresses of the Comintern pre­vented them from
avoiding a pathetic repeti­tion of all its errors. Within Russia,
the Left Opposition failed to make the necessary break with the
party-state apparatus, a break which could have placed them firmly on
the terrain of the proletarian struggle against the regime, alongside
the genuine left communist fractions. Although his enemies tried to
implicate Trotsky for entering into relations with illegal groupings
like the Workers’ Truth, Trotsky him­self explicitly
dissociated himself from these groupings. He referred to the Workers’
Truth group as the “Workers’
Untruth”
(Carr, The
Interregnum)
and himself participated in the repression of the ‘ultra-left’,
for example by assisting in the commission which investigated the
activities of the Workers’ Opposition in 1922. All that Trotsky
would admit was that the groups were symptoms of a genuine
degeneration in the Soviet regime.

But
the Left Opposition in its early years was not simply Trotsky. Many
of the signa­tories of the Platform
of the Forty-Six
were former left communists and Democratic Centralists like Ossinski,
Smirnov, Piatakov, and others. And as Miasnikov said:

“There
are not only great men in the Trotskyist opposition. There are also
many workers. And these will not want to follow the leaders; after
some hesita­tions, they will enter the ranks of the Workers’
Group.”
(L’Ouvrier
Communiste,
no . 6, January 1930)

Precisely
because the Left Opposition was
a proletarian current, it naturally gave birth to a left wing which
went far beyond the timid criticisms of Stalinism made by Trotsky and
his ‘orthodox’ followers. To­wards the end of the twenties a
current known as the ‘irreconcilables’ grew up with­in the
Left Opposition, composed largely of young workers who opposed the
tendency of the ‘moderate’ Trotskyists to move to­wards some
kind of reconciliation with the Stalin faction, a tendency which
accelera­ted after 1928 when Stalin appeared to be rapidly
carrying out the Left Opposition’s programme of industrialization.
Isaac Deutscher writes that among the irreconci­lables:

“ ...
the view was already becoming axio­matic that the Soviet Union
was no longer a workers’ state; that the party had betrayed the
revolution; and that the hope to reform it being futile, the
Oppo­sition should constitute itself into a new party and preach
and prepare a new revolution. Some saw Stalin as the pro­moter of
agrarian capitalism or even, the leader of a ‘kulak democracy’
while to others his rule epitomized the ascen­dancy of a state
capitalism implacably hostile to socialism.” (The
Prophet Outcast)

In
his book Au
Pays du Grand Mensonge,
Anton Ciliga gives an eye-witness account of the debates within the
Left Opposition that took place inside Stalin’s labour camps. He
shows that some Left Opposition­ists stood for capitulating to
the Stali­nist system, others stood for reforming it, and still
others for a ‘political revolution’ to remove the bureaucracy
(the position Trotsky himself was to adopt). But the irreconcilables
or “negators”
as he calls them (Ciliga himself was one):

“ ...
believed that not only the political order but also the social and
economic orders were foreign and hostile to the proletariat. We
therefore envisaged not only a political but also a social
revo­lution that should open up a road to the development of
socialism. According to us, the bureaucracy was a real class, a class
hostile to the proletariat.” (Reproduced in ‘Revolutionary
Politics in Stalin’s Prisons’, an Oppositionist
pamphlet.)

In
January 1930, writing in L’Ouvrier
Communiste
(no.6) Miasnikov wrote of the Left Opposition that:

“There
are only two possibilities. Either the Trotskyists regroup under the
slogan
‘war on the palaces, peace to the cottages’, under the banner of
the work­ers’ revolution, the first step of which must be the
proletariat becoming the ru­ling class, or they will languish
slowly and pass individually or collectively into the camp of the
bourgeoisie. These are the only two alternatives. There is no third
way.”

The
events of the 1930s, which saw the def­initive passage of the
Trotskyists into the armies of capital were to bear out Miasni­kov’s
prediction. But still the best ele­ments of the Left Opposition
were able to follow the other path, the path of the wor­kers’
revolution. Disgusted by Trotsky’s failure to confirm their
analysis in his writings from abroad, they broke from the Left
Opposition in 1930-2 and began to work with remnants of the Workers’
Group and the Democratic Centralism group in prison, evolving an
analysis of the failure of the world revolution and the meaning of
state capitalism. As Ciliga points out in his book, they were no
longer afraid to go right to the heart of the question and to accept
that the degeneration of the revolu­tion had not begun with
Stalin but had gathered pace even under the aegis of Lenin and
Trotsky. As Marx used to say, to be radical means to
go to the root.In
those dark years of reaction, what better contri­bution could the
communist left have made than to have burrowed fearlessly to the
roots of the proletariat’s defeat?

***************

Some
may see the debates that the Russian left communists carried on in
prison as nothing but a symbol of the impotence of revolutionary
ideas in the face of the capi­talist leviathan. But although
their situa­tion was the expression of a profound defeat for the
proletariat, the very fact that they continued to clarify the lessons
of the revo­lution in such appalling circumstances is a sign that
the historic mission of the pro­letariat can never be buried by
the temporary victory of the counter-revolution – even if that
victory lasts for decades. As Miasnikov wrote in connection with the
imprisonment of Sapranov:

“Now
Sapranov has been arrested. Even exile and the stifling of his voice
did not succeed in diminishing his energy, and the bureaucracy could
not feel safe about him till he was in the solid walls of a prison.
But a powerful spirit, the spirit of the October Revolution, can’t
be put in prison; even the grave can’t hide it. The principles of
the revolution are still alive in the working class in Russia and as
long as the wor­king class lives this idea cannot die. You can
arrest Sapranov, but not the idea of the revolution.”
(L’Ouvrier
Communiste,
1929)

It
is true that the Stalinist bureaucracy long ago succeeded in wiping
out the last communist minorities in Russia. But today, when a new
wave of international proletarian struggle is finding a muffled echo
even amongst the proletariat in Russia, the “powerful spirit” of
a second October has returned to haunt the minds of the Stalinist
hangmen in Moscow and their offspring in Warsaw, Prague and Peking.
When the workers of the ‘Socialist Fatherland’ rise up to destroy
once and for all the vast prison of the Stalinist state, they will,
in conjunc­tion with their class brothers all over the world, at
last be able to solve the problems posed both by the revolution of
1917 and its
loyal defenders: the revolutionaries of the Russian communist left.

“What
is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential,
the kernel from the accidental excrescences in the policies of the
Bolsheviks. In the
present period, when we face decisive final struggles in all the
world, the most important problem of socialism was and is the burning
question of our time. It is not a matter of this or that sec­ondary
question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the
proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as
such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first,
those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world;
they are still the only
ones up
to now who can cry with Hutten: “I have dared!”

“This
is the essential and enduring
in
Bolshevik policy. In this
sense
theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the
head of the inter­national proletariat with the conquest of
political power and the practical placing of the problem of the
realization of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the
settlement of the score between capital and labour in the entire
world. In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be
solved in Russia. And in this
sense,
the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism’.”
(Rosa Luxemburg, The
Russian Revolution)

C.
D. Ward

1The Manifesto of the Workers’ Group is available (together
with the KAPD’s footnotes) in French in Invariance, Series
II, no. 6. An incomplete version appeared in English in the
following issues of the Workers’ Dreadnought: 1 December
1923, 5 January 1924. The Appeal of the Workers’ Truth
group was published in the Socialist Herald, Berlin, 31
January 1923; extracts from it appear in English in Daniels, A
Documentary History of Communism.

2
The 17 June text and another text on the United Front by the same
group were reproduced in Workers’ Voice, no. 14.

3
Miasnikov’s subsequent history is as follows: from 1923 to 1927 he
spent most of his time in prison or exile for underground
activities. Escaping from Russia in 1927 he fled to Persia and
Turkey, eventually settling in France in 1930. During this period he
was still trying to organize his group in Russia. In 1946, for
reasons best known to himself, (perhaps expecting a new revolution
after the war?), Miasnikov returned to Russia…..and has never
heard of since.

4
The KAPD published the Manifesto of the Workers’ Group with
their own critical footnotes. They did not accept the Workers’
Groups analysis of the NEP. For them Russia in 1923 was a country of
peasant-dominated capitalism and the NEP was the expression of this.
Thus they stood “not for the transcendence of the NEP, but for
its violent abolition”.

5
Writing in L’Ouvrier Communiste in 1929 Miasnikov reported
on a conference held in August in 1928 between the Worker’s Group,
Sapranov’s ‘Group of Fifteen’, and remnants of the Workers’
Opposition. Arriving at a high level of programmatic agreement, the
conference resolved to “constitute the Central Bureau of the
Workers’ Group into the Central Organizational Bureau of the
Communist Workers’ Parties of the USSR.” (The decision to
set-up Communist Workers’ Parties for USSR may reflect the
concern to ensure autonomy for each Soviet republic and its
Communist Party expressed in the 1923 Manifesto, a
‘decentralist’ tendency that was criticized by the KAPD in their
notes to the Manifesto.)

Of the former Democraric Centralist Sapranov
and his group, Miasnikov had this to say:

“Comrade Sapranov was not made of the
same material as the leaders of the opposition of the celebrities.
The friendly embraces, and kisses of Lenin did not smother him or
kill the living, critical, proletarian spirit in him. And in the
years 1926-7 he reappeared again as leader of the ‘Group of
Fifteen’. The Platform of the Group of Fifteen had no links either
in ideas or theories with the platform of Democratic Centralism. It
was a new platform of a new group, with no other link to the past of
Democratic Centralism other than the fact that its spokesman was
Sapranov.

The Group of Fifteen drew its name from
the fact that its platform was signed by fifteen comrades. In its
main points, in its estimation of the nature of the state of USSR,
its ideas about the workers’ state, the programme of the Fifteen
is very close to the ideology of the Workers’ Group.”